On-premises data gateway November update is now available

We are excited to announce that we have just released the November update for the On-premises data gateway. This update includes the following enhancements:

The public preview of the long-awaited High Availability support.

The “Additional Logging” setting of the gateway will now include the Mashup engine traces.

The gateway will now automatically fall back to communicating through Azure Service Bus using HTTPS if direct TCP fails.

The gateway now includes the November version of the Mashup engine.

You can download this new version from the link below and continue reading for more details about each enhancement.

High availability support

This month’s gateway update introduces the public preview of the previously announced High Availability support. High Availability for the on-premises data gateway provides gateway administrators a way to group multiple gateway instances together thus eliminating the single point of failure and overall providing a more robust and scalable infrastructure for the on-premises data gateway.

Setting up a high availability cluster of gateways

As part of the on-premises data gateway installation, users can specify whether the gateway instance should be added to an existing cluster or a new one. Older gateways are exposed in their own clusters, so users can associate new gateway instances with the existing ones or set up new clusters.

Note that in order to add a new gateway instance to an existing cluster, users have to provide the recovery key for the primary gateway of the cluster they’re trying to join the new gateway. The primary gateway minimum version must be the August 2017 update (which is version “13.0.2248.0”).

Managing a cluster

Once more than one gateway instances are registered within a single cluster, all gateway management operations (such as adding a data source or granting users permissions to use or manage a gateway) will be applied at the cluster level. When accessing the “Manage Gateways” page in PowerBI.com, users will see the list of registered clusters (or standalone gateways), but not the list of gateway instances within a given cluster.

New requests for scheduled refresh or DirectQuery operations will be routed to the primary instance in the cluster if this instance is online; if not available, the request will be routed to another instance registered in the cluster.

PowerShell support

As part of this feature, new PowerShell scripts are available in the gateway installation folder (i.e. “C:\Program Files\On-premises data gateway”). These PowerShell scripts provide a set of commands that allow users to:

Retrieve the list of gateway clusters available for a user

Retrieve the list of gateway instances registered in a cluster, as well as their online/offline status.

Modify the enable/disable status for a gateway instance within a cluster, or other gateway properties.

Delete a gateway.

To learn more about the new High Availability capabilities in the gateway, please refer to our documentation page here. Try it out and let us know below in the comments if you have any comments or questions.

“Additional Logging” now include the Mashup engine traces

The Additional Logging settings in the Diagnostics tab of the gateway will now allow the Mashup engine traces to be included in the logs. This could help with investigating and troubleshooting connectivity issues.

HTTPS mode fallback

Since the March 2017 gateway update, users were able to choose to force the gateway to communicate with Azure Service Bus using HTTPS instead of direct TCP (the latter is the default).

With this month’s update, the gateway will automatically turn on this setting if direct TCP fails for any reason while the gateway is being configured for the first time.

Updated version of the Mashup engine

Last but not least, this gateway update includes the same version of the Mashup engine as the Power BI Desktop update released earlier this month. This will ensure that the reports that you publish to the Power BI Service and refresh via the gateway will go through the same query execution logic/runtime as in the latest Power BI Desktop version. Note that there are some Beta connectors (such as Spark) still not supported outside of Power BI Desktop. Please refer to specific connector documentation for more details or contact us if you have any questions.